Homeland Security Watch turns the mike over to the former Assistant Chief of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Department of Police in 'Do I have the right to refuse this search?' and she suggests that there are some pretty large gaps in TSA training and procedures at airports.
I look forward to Stewart Baker's reply.
Congrats to the public-spirited lawyers at my old law firm, now called WilmerHale, for spending almost $1 million worth of pro-bono time to free an innocent man — without DNA evidence. Read all the details at TalkLeft, Court Frees NY Man After 26 Years “Compelling Innocence” Case. It is hard not to agree with the conclusion:
How many other innocent persons are languishing in our prisons because of withheld evidence, lying snitches, faulty eyewitness testimony, false confessions, junk science, lab fraud, ineffective counsel and other reasons not able to be discerned by DNA evidence, which either never existed or was not preserved — or because they don't have the means to retain dedicated counsel like those the Innocence Project found for Mr Bozella?
You know you are having a good day when 'Above the Law' (ATL) writes something positive about you — and that was my experience this afternoon with University of Miami Law School Puts Some Money into Public Service.
In addition to not making me look bad — indeed, making me look nice — I especially liked the conclusion of the piece,
The recession has created a huge need for legal services. And it has created a glut of laid off or unemployed lawyers. But matching the attorneys to the work is difficult because it is tough to pay off law school debts by helping low income families fight off foreclosure proceedings. Miami’s programs aren’t going to fix that fundamental disconnect between the cost of law school and the need for legal services.
But the school has taken a nice step in the right direction. The fellowship stipend might not be much, but it is infinitely more valuable than lip service.
ATL is best known for ribbing or even bashing lawyers and law schools…and the commentators in its threads are ferocious on a good day, and worse otherwise. (Indeed, the first comment on the article reads, in full, “Suck it.”)
The law school also got a good write-up in the ABA Journal's Miami Law Grads Get $10K Foreclosure Fellowships to Fill Legal Services Gap.
Update: Even nicer write up at South Florida Lawyers. Thanks guys.
TIME Magazine has a great story by Tim Padgett on UM's Foreclosure Fellowships, Another Housing Crisis: A Shortage of Foreclosure Lawyers.
Nice quotes from Yolanda Paschal, one of our great Fellows, from Carolina Lombardi, a senior attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami Inc., and a few words from me. I'm glad that our program is getting some recognition. As the article says, the foreclosure defense problem is enormous, the legal resources available are puny compared to the need, and we at the law school are trying to do something about it.
Whether and how we can repeat this year's effort, however, still depends on what sort of funding we can raise for it. Fund raising is very very tough in the current economic climate. Our current plan is to shift away from giving fellowships to graduates and instead ramp up on a student-staffed housing-related clinic that might even be housed downtown. In a perfect world, I'd like to do both the clinic and the graduate Fellowships, but the funding is not yet in hand to make that possible.
Incidentally, the legal defense for borrowers that I mentioned in the the TIME article — that parties foreclosing sometimes don't actually know who owns the note — is featured in a column in today's NYT, Gretchen Morgenson's If Lenders Say 'The Dog Ate Your Mortgage'. In other cases there are different meritorious defenses, but it takes a trained person to identify them. And then no doubt there are the cases where people really will lose their homes no matter what you do; the point is to figure out which case is which rather than just give up. And that takes a lawyer.
Via SFDB, The GOP Plan, an unusually tough video from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
I thought this one was unusually good, although (or perhaps because?) it seems a lot like an ad for some new second-rate sitcom.
Is this the worst pun ever to appear as a headline to a front page article in the NYT? The Loin in Winter: Hugh Hefner Ponders His Legacy.
Dull article, though. Who cares if Hefner is or isn't going broke, dating 20-year-olds, aging, or sponsoring a six volume biography?
Jotwell Blenderlaw